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Dev Site Vs Test Site Vs Live Site

Hi, i am close to launching a site i have been working hard on for the past while. The site is developed in PHP.

I have been developing the site on a VPS with one hosting company (A) and now i have moved the live site to a new better hosting company (B) (i won't go into why they are better)

Ok, so i was thinking of running with the following set up:

- development environment on VPS with hosting company A
- test environment with new hosting company B
- live site with new hosting company B

This means i have to pay 2 hosting companies quite a lot of money per month, which is not a huge problem if needed... but do you think i would be ok running with just hosting company B and running the live site beside one testing and development site...

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer on this subject, it is much appreciated...

I personally prefer to have each environment on their own virtual machine. This way if you are testing something in development, you don't incidentally create an infinite loop or something equally crippling to the server. Depending on the way your VPS works, this may or may not be possible with one host, I know it is with my hosts. I'm sorry I can't help you further, but my advice is to NOT make it possible to cripple the live site when testing development.

I would think that your development environment could be your own local machine. Your test site, on the other hand, should be hosted on a machine identical to the live host, in terms of both hardware and software, because the point is to find out how the live site would react to code changes. But the test and live hosts must also be separate and independent, because if the test site has an error and consumes lots of resources, then you don't want that to affect the live site.